


Good, Better, Best

by bell (bellaboo), bellaboo, usomitai (bellaboo)



Category: House M.D.
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-02
Updated: 2009-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 00:53:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellaboo/pseuds/bell, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellaboo/pseuds/bellaboo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellaboo/pseuds/usomitai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“For all you know, this could be the difference between what you need and what you want to be.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good, Better, Best

**Author's Note:**

> My beta was the incomparable [](http://beeinmybonnet.livejournal.com/profile)[**beeinmybonnet**](http://beeinmybonnet.livejournal.com/). ♥
> 
> This was written for [](http://queenzulu.livejournal.com/profile)[**queenzulu**](http://queenzulu.livejournal.com/) as part of a [drabble meme](http://usomitai.livejournal.com/381529.html). Takes place towards the end of season 3.

Foreman thinks of himself as a good man. His high school friends accused him of thinking he was ‘too good’ for them; he hasn’t talked to them since graduation. In college and for the rest of his life he’s been called arrogant, over-achieving, cold. “What’re you trying to prove?” His second girlfriend asked him sophomore year, just before breaking up with him.

What isn’t he trying to prove.

He’s been asked that same question now, by House, and Foreman doesn’t know how he’s ended up here, in the home of the boss he will leave tomorrow, a bottle and a half of wine downed between the two of them. Foreman’s tie is loosened, a couple of shirt buttons undone. He undid them without thinking about it, and it’s a surprise to look and see all that undone.

House hadn’t been wearing a tie, but his suit jacket is off, leaving him in a t-shirt that Foreman knows doesn't cover his midriff, given the way he’s leaning, like wet clay, against his chair. House has been mellow all evening; maybe it was because he’d been at the piano. Foreman hadn’t heard a thing, but the piano was open when he came in, its bench pulled out. Foreman hasn’t ever really heard House play; he was there for that mini-concert with the idiot savant they treated a couple of months back, but that doesn’t count. And now that he’s leaving, he never will hear House play; disappointment fills him. House must be brilliant at music, as he is at all things; brilliant and infuriating.

“What’re you trying to prove?” House asks. The sun went down a while back, and neither one bothered to get up and turn on the lights. They sit there in the semi-darkness and Foreman can only just make out House’s outline from the outside lights that filter in through the uncovered windows.

Seeing so little, Foreman’s words are dangerously loose, and he controls himself. “Nothing.”

“Nothing is what you _will_ prove. I asked what you’re _trying_.”

Growing up, Foreman’s apartment didn’t have an elevator, and every day he had to run up seven flights, even when he had a cold or was soaked from the rain. When his brother broke his leg, he had to help him up those flights, one step at a time. A couple of years later, Foreman’s sneakers pinched his toes, but he had to keep on wearing them even as his feet grew and grew. He wore them until his brother got the money for a new pair. Foreman knew how he got that money. He wore them anyway.

Foreman’s own crime isn’t on paper, but it’s committed to his memory, the memory of those who lived through it, and all of those who heard about it afterwards. He can’t ever take back that foolish teenager mistake.

Everyone, at first sight, at Colombia thought he was there to fill the school’s race quota and studying there with the “pity scholarship” money that should’ve been theirs. They stopped thinking that once he earned the grades to show them wrong.

“Not trying to prove anything. I just want to do what’s right. And last I checked, treating your patients like crap isn’t.”

House’s chuckle, deep and pitiless, makes Foreman’s blood livid. “You tell yourself that. It makes you feel better, doesn’t it? You do good things because you’re a good man. Repeat it enough and maybe you’ll even believe it, one day.”

“How about you?” Deflecting as defense. It’s a technique he’s perfected under House, and even if Foreman wants to stop being like him, he has no qualms using it against the master deflector. “Trying to prove you have nothing you _want_ to prove. You still can’t stand yourself, no matter what you pretend.”

“Is that what this is?” House sounds amused. “You don’t want to hate yourself?”

He’s a good man. He listens to his patients, letting them go on their tangents in case that reveals something the symptoms they’ve listed don’t. He stays up all night running tests to reach a diagnosis, to get them what they need. He has worked miserable wages and for a man who galls him like no other, all to become the best. Foreman’s a good man. And House is a doctor without par, healing where no one else could. But Foreman isn’t willing to pay the price to become the best. Not anymore, now that he understands the cost.

Foreman could lie. But what’s the point? House will see straight through him, no matter what he says. “I want to be a better man.”


End file.
